Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Wednesday November 17, 2010 @12:28PM
from the end-of-an-era dept.

Darkon writes "UK Culture minister Ed Vaizey has backed a 'two-speed internet', letting service providers charge content makers and customers for 'fast lane' access. It paves the way for an end to 'net neutrality' — with heavy bandwidth users like Google and the BBC likely to face a bill for the pipes they use."

I can hear it now, almost a throwback to the 60's..."dangburn newfangled hippies with their free love, free net, free information! Every redblooded {American|Brit} knows you get what you pay for! Can't have vagrants just lolligagging around on the net! The pricetag filters out the hoodlums!"

The problem is that BT Wholesale wants to bypass the ISP altogether and offer BBC and Google's content directly to the consumer, probably moving to paid content later on.

This is a two tier internet in more sense than one. The "high speed" content does not go through the mandatory Great Firewall of Britain - the anti-paedo system. It also breaks the already completely b0rken British internet model in further and more fantastic ways to a point where

Well, I'm certainly not getting paid to put up with these shenanigans.

To be a little more serious though, ISPs have it in their head that they can get more money if they come up with a scheme to double-bill people or corporate entities. They're looking to governments to allow it, and it looks like someone high up in the UK wants to support it. Once in effect, they can make even more money that they can continue to not spend on improvements.

Maybe Google should, and state that because of the hostile practices that $ISP does, Google is forced to delay each search for $TIME. Most users would get onto their ISP's case real fast if the daily content they access, they have to wait 30-60 seconds for like one of the filesharing sites.

It would be good for Google. ISPs have more to lose if content providers pick up their toys and go home.

It has come to the good Minister's attention, via very earnest talks with telecom industry representatives, that the Internet is not a lorry. You just don't dump a movie on to the Internet without it getting mixed up with everyone's emails. And in fact, unlike when you mail a DVD, a movie on the Internet is not a single package. A movie can be many hundreds of thousands of packages. In fact, with the help of a very complex Powerpoint slide, the Honourable Minister was able to understand that merely even beginning to send a movie on the Internet requires a "three way handshake" which is, in effect, three whole messages being sent back and forth on the Internet. Meanwhile, the poor, near impoverished telecoms have been fooled in to under-charging by at least 1/3 of what they should be owed. They have attempted to make this up by charging the service provider and the user but that is only 2 of the fair 3 charges owed; and that's just this handshake. It doesn't even take account all the other packets involved. Clearly someone has made a mistake and it will take government to step in and rectify the situation. To further educate the Honourable Minister, the British Phonographic Industry attended the presentation and noted that the thousands of packets noted by the telecom industry each represents a lost sale and is largely the cause of the Spice Girls entering retirement.

Your ISP isn't getting paid by Google to allow the pipe your paying for to connect to the pipe they are paying for. That's one of the big evils that Net Neutrality is specifically about preventing.

Personally, I think there should be two categories for ISPs, and it should be up to the individual ISP which one they want to be -- either a common carrier, in which case they are not legally responsible for anything going across their lines but are forbidden from pulling this kind of shit, or a private carrier, in which case they can pull all the BS they want on the lines, but are also ultimately legally responsible for all content on their network. If you pull filtering tricks or the kind of thing in this story, then since you are filtering the content in some form, your customers and those you peer to can assume said content is legal, as you are yb your own inspection process certifying it as such.

Now that every ISP takes the "common carrier -- I don't want sued out of existence because something illegal went across my lines" option, welcome to 'net neutrality. =p

Indirectly they are: Google pays "ISP" A (rather the network companies they connect to) and the consumer pays ISP B, and then ISP A and ISP B are supposed to come together and divide the income based on that traffic.

Apparently that latter part has fallen apart somehow, since competing ISPs either price their service so low they do not actually cover costs, or they spend it all on other things, and now try to rewrite the rules.

> Your ISP isn't getting paid by Google to allow the pipe you're paying for to connect to the pipe they are paying for.

No, but the provider that pumps Google's data onto your ISP's network, is paying your ISP for that privilege by allowing your ISP to pump an equivalent amount of data onto their network. This is roughly what peering is about, and it balances those kind of network traffic accountings without resorting to too many financial transactions.

It's not really about "not" getting paid, so much as it is about creating a way to control and capitalize on the technology; to the point it becomes useless of course with the latter being the ultimate endgame. It's in the same boat as DRM. And the RIAA at the helm.

I think most here generally support neutrality. Some argue that ISPs should be able to prioritize traffic based on type but not destination - they could give priority to latency critical, but low bandwidth, packets like VOIP at the expense of FTP; but not give priority to their own VOIP traffic above other VOIP traffic.

That seems to sum up the common opinion pretty well. There's a fundamental difference between basic QoS to improve performance in general (giving low bandwidth, ping critical apps higher priority than higher bandwidth apps where ping is less important, such as VOIP and gaming vs web and bittorrent) and giving you a terrible connection to Vonage so you'll use your cable provider's VOIP system or giving you a lightning fast connection to Bing but 0.005k/s and a 3000 ping to Google because MS paid your ISP bu

I think most here generally support neutrality. Some argue that ISPs should be able to prioritize traffic based on type but not destination - they could give priority to latency critical, but low bandwidth, packets like VOIP at the expense of FTP; but not give priority to their own VOIP traffic above other VOIP traffic.

The challenge with prioritization over the Internet is the trust model. If my ISP were to trust my network to mark priority levels there's nothing that prevents me from selfishly flagging all my traffic as real-time just to give myself lower-latency web browsing. So clearly the ISP won't trust anyone but themselves to mark traffic. Or maybe they trust me but only permit a certain percentage of bandwidth to be marked real-time, and charging me for that privilege depending on how big of a percentage I want. T

To my mind, it makes sense to have pricing clearly defined based on the bandwidth you use. It should be no different than your electric bill where you're charged based on the power you use. Take my parents - They "do email," now and again watch youtube vids of the grandkids and surf the web a bit. Contrast this with my brother-in-law who is constantly torrenting, playing online games and using netflix. I'm somewhere in the middle. There should be a mechanism to charge us different rates based on our usage. My parents shouldn't be subsidizing my brother-in-law.

However the ISPs don't seem to be well equipped to build this sort of system...

There are mechanisms to charge you different rates based on your usage - they already exist. There are various tiers for your alloted download / upload amounts - it is not as "Unlimitted" as you might think it is. If your brother in law goes over 100GB a month and isn't on fibre optic - he probably pays more than his monthly plan is set for.

They treat it more like television currently - and I'd rather it stay like that as opposed to being charged for every bit of traffic I use. ISP's will find ways to abuse

If your brother in law goes over 100GB a month and isn't on fibre optic - he probably pays more than his monthly plan is set for.

Depends on where he lives. When I had DSL I could saturate the connection the whole month (and my upload was saturated all the time) and the ISP didn't care. Now I have fiber and a much faster connection and upload way more than I could with DSL and the ISP still doesn't care.

But yes, because if the way internet works, I'd rather pay a fixed fee and not one based on data transferred. If I paid for every MB transferred then I should not pay for the packets lost in the ISPs network for example.

Small users would rather pay a usage-based fee and thus not support your habit of saturating your connection. It's just like prepaid vs. post-paid phones.

Small users would not get my 200/200/80/80 connection too. They can get a 20/20/5/5 and pay 11EUR for it, instead of ~29 that I pay. If the user uses the internet even less, he can get a 10/10/1/1 connection for 2.8EUR/month, but can only use it for 5 days (any 5 days in a month), each additional day is 0.58EUR. This is for those who can get fiber.

Now, if the user actually uses the internet very little, it makes more sense to get a data plan for a cell phone, since the connection will always be with you. Fo

Also, ISPs don't want to do what you propose. Not because they can't... in fact it'd be easy for them to do so. But likely that would drop their profits too much. All the $60/mnth people that use their internet for e-mail would end up paying them less....much less.

Net Neutrality would not be necessary if we had true choice for consumers among many companies.

But since we instead have monopoly (like Comcast) or duopoly (Comcast/Verizon), that creates the need for the government to regulate and impose net neutrality, the same way they impose it on the Telephone monopoly.

"Net Neutrality" is sort of like "Free Speech" or "Free Markets." It's a laudable in theory, and constantly held high as a virtue, but in practice "Net Neutrality" in any society will eventually reach the same status as Free Speech and Free Markets: the majority of it will wind up under the control of a few, very powerful institutions (Corporations, Governments, or Collectives depending on the political environment), and those who truly want to exercise free Bandwidth/Speech/Trade will be relegated to a "p

How is the bandwidth Google uses not being paid for now? I know that ISP's charge me money to access the internet, and I'd imagine that Google already pays whatever service provider hooks their network into the internet. What am I missing here?

That would in fact be fairer than what they are trying to do. Take comcast as a good example. They just purchased NBC. Now let's say you are a comcast customer and you want to stream an episode of Chuck and then an episode of NCIS. Chuck streams great no lag or stuttering but NCIS coughs and sputters and buffers all the way through and you just think CBS.com sucks compared to NBC.com but in fact comcast saw you were streaming a show from a competitors web site and flagged your packets with a low priority so all other traffic gets to go first. Then CBS cries foul and comcast tells them if they want their content to get delivered without interruption they'll have to pay a "protection" fee to ensure on-time delivery. Now imagine they are doing this to ABC.com, Google, Yahoo, etc., etc. If they can get this practice federally labeled legal they stand to add billions to their bottom line for relatively no extra work.

In the UK, Sky owns newspapers, TV, as well as an ISP. They recently put The Times behind a pay wall where it is dying a rapid and painful death. The logical thing for them to do would be to throttle the speed of rival newspapers to make them unreadable, leaving paying £1/day to Murdoch as the only reasonable way of getting news. They can do the same with TV, making their VoD the only usable one.

That already happens, website operators and people accessing the net already *both* pay for the privilege in some form. This would be charging one (or both) parties extra to connect to someone in particular.

Not exactly. As of now my ISP only bills me and I'd be surprised google shares the same ISP. This proposal would allow every ISP to try (cause providers could choose to be low priority and not pay) to charge twice for every byte going through.

As of now, I'm paying my ISP for their network (my ISP pays a backbone for their network) while the service provider pays another ISP for that other part of the network (and that ISP pays a backbone for their network). So the only double payment occurs if I share the s

Phone - Person A gets charged for bit xfered.Cellphone - Person A and B get charged for bit xfered.Internet - Person A and B get charged for bit xfered.Net neutrality fails - Person A and B get charged for bit xfered. Then person A gets charged to connect to person B instead of person C. And person B gets charged so that person A is allowed to call them.

I disagree with your statement. As I've answered to "arose" just before you, your payment to your ISP covers your ISP's part of the network and indirectly the backbone that your ISP uses. But it doesn't cover the whole network (meaning every other part of the network owned by other ISPs). So we pay more than one time per byte, but less than two actually.

so why would they bother paying for such things now?...Google might seem slower

It might seem that way, but that's probably because of the throttling applied by your ISP. Don't worry, if you call and ask them about it, their staff in India are trained to explain how it must be a problem with Google, just like when Comcast started throttling torrents.

If ISPs had been upgrading their bandwidth at a regular rate, then I could suspend disbelief long enough to say that they are honestly offering "more" bandwidth

Atm there is nothing stopping MS from paying Verizon to make Google artificially slow. Or for that matter putting ads on Google's site for Bing.

More likely what will happen is something like two-tiered health care (and the reason it is a failure). Verizon will charge places like Google double so that they get faster access to you. Then to ensure more people pay for their faster service they will slowly degrade their regular lane until it is horribly unusable. At which point everyone will have to be paying

If Google doesn't want to pay for more exclusive access speeds or priority of service why would their bill go any higher than it is right now?

It will work like this: today's "normal" will become tomorrow's premium service, and tomorrow's "normal" will be a degraded lower priority service. If you continue to pay for "normal", your service will get worse. To maintain the service you're used to, you'll need to upgrade to a premium service.

This is great. If they do that, Google can just cut those guys off from their network entirely, and they can wither and die as they should. Google has quite a bit of dark fiber. Shouldn't be too hard to finish out the rest of the network.

No, son. It was a plaything of Politics. Goverments, Music industries, Extremists. Everybody threatened us with sanctions on what we did with the Internet.
There even was a time we would stand to loose it completely as its usefulness was crippled.
Internet's usefulness is directly connected to the amount of people using it. And who would use it if the risks got to high?
We almost lost it all.
Now shut up and finish your introduction game so Google can generate a personalized profile for you. You don't want to receive Viagra ads do you?

10 years from now, I can see it. "Daddy what's the internet? Was it anything like the googlenet is today?"

... And all the googlecams in the room pivot in his direction to subtly remind him to answer carefully because people in India, China, Australia, and probably Mrs. Noseybitty down the street are all googling him right now.

The BBC is largely the problem (for the ISPs). They spent years telling everyone how awesome their hugely over-subscribed services were for streaming media and the like, then the Beeb came along with the iPlayer, everyone started using it and the ISPs were faced with two choices: Upgrade their networks to actually provide the service they sold to their users or spend almost as much money lobbying the government to force the BBC to pay them for the privilege of transporting their content over the last mile.

If and only if it has the following two speeds:
- The minimum guaranteed reserved bandwidth I pay for (which is currently almost always unknown, and can change without notice)
- The maximum burst bandwidth I pay for (which is what they currently advertise)

Currently there are too many oversold connections with burst speeds of 20, 30, 60 or even 120 mbit being sold without any mention of the minimum reserved bandwidth, and those speeds become lower and lower when they oversubscribe the line. Consumers need to know the minimum as well as the maximum bandwidth they are paying for.

* smartass notice: yes I know you can't guarantee an actual minimum bandwidth in practice, but I'm talking about the uplink (i.e. 100 mbit uplink shared with 50 users = 2mbit guaranteed, in contrast to the maximum advertised speed which would probably be 20mbit in this setup).

Nominally, this proposal will have no detrimental impact on any current service. Put simply, ISPs are being given the option to offer a "premium" service to those data suppliers who wish for their content to be delivered at a "premium" rate, at a premium price, thereby improving their perceived web experience.

To the simple-minded, this is a perfectly straightforward case of adding value to a service and charging for that added value. Nobody has to pay anything extra if they don't want to. However, this doesn't address the brutal reality.

Firstly, ISPs already saturate their bandwidth as far as they're able in order to be competitive. The creation of an express-lane for premium content will, by default, require the degrading of non-premium content delivery. Certainly the increased revenue could be used to improve infrastructure and have a net benefit on all bandwidth, but ISPs are businesses and it's fundamentally naive to assume this will be the result.

Secondly - and more importantly - this move would change the culture of the web irrevocably. In the first instance, content providers will have to pick a camp, and we will be faced with a two-tier system. Two-tier will just be the beginning though, and companies will have to quickly start incorporating their "content deliver" streaming costs into their business strategy. Like any variable, contracted service, it will be open to competition, abuse and legal dicking-about. It will change the very nature of the web, and we will all suffer from the lack of an even field.

A more subtle problem would be the loss of impetus to improve the efficiency of data delivery. As things stand, it is in every single person's and organisation's interest to constantly strive to improve the bandwidth-efficiency of their sites, languages, algorithms and services. As soon as the big guns find themselves able to take a short-cut to improving their users' web-experience by paying for it, half the major driving force behind these innovations in efficiency will be gone.

I'm sure there are many other reasons to oppose this change, and I honestly can't think of any compelling reason to approve it - unless, as I said, one takes the short-sighted, uninformed (or plain greedy) stance that this would improve certain uses of the web, at least for now.

Put simply, ISPs are being given the option to offer a "premium" service to those data suppliers who wish for their content to be delivered at a "premium" rate, at a premium price, thereby improving their perceived web experience.

Are the ISPs going to build new premium lines for this service? Why can't they do it now, build a new faster line and sell it?

If they don't going to build new lines then they have to slow down everybody else, and the ones with are paying more will have the same speed (i.e. the speed that ISPs usually selling, the maximum speed of the line).

Seriously... we all know Google etc already pay for the uplink, power, servers, etc, and the "users" that are using bandwidth are the people requesting. Who are also paying ISPs already for what they use (the ISPs wrote the contracts!).

Logic and reason aren't going to work here or they already would have. It's unfortunate Google has sworn off evil; they're in a unique position here to do what a less philanthropic business would have long ago: start demanding payment from ISPs, especially the big ones. Hey Comcast, want your users to have fast access to Google? You should start paying Google then. Or maybe AT&T will sign and your customers will go there, because everyone uses Google.

Of course, this will cause politicians etc to start whining about fairness, antitrust, and how the net should be neutral to large players. Congratulations, we win. =P

I don't know exactly what he is proposing, but a good idea could be...

The users pay the same amount of money and a guaranteed a minimum bandwidth... so suppose you are downloading some stuff from a random place(say xyz), you will get your minimum speed,now here is the catch, the big companies (say youtube), can pay extra to the isp's so that on their websites you will get more than a minimum speed that you pay for,

so in the end, suppose i pay for a 4 mbps connectioni get 4 mbps when i

To paraphrase Morbo: "The internet does not work that way!" - either I'm paying my ISP to provide access to, say Google or Google is paying my ISP for me to access them. My ISP doesn't get to take money from me and from Google for the same thing. That's like me posting a letter with correct postage and then when it arrives at your house the postman demands you pay for the postage again or he refuses to deliver it.

"bandwidth users like Google and the BBC likely to face a bill for the pipes they use"
They already face a bill for the pipes they use. Now someone wants to make them pay a bill for the pipes end users use to get to google and bbc, even though those pipes are already payed for by the end users.

Well, if the ISPs start charging the content providers (i.e. the VERY REASON people got a broadband subscription from them in the first place), watch the paywalls go up faster than frontier towns, as the content providers try to earn back the protection money that Comcast et al are asking for.

Another approach could be that Google etc. start deducting the expenses they pay to these "extra" ISPs from the pay to their own internet connection partners so that they avoid paying twice, then those partners can go

I'm probably missing something, and someone will correct me hopefully, but how will a multi-tier system work with the multiple ISPs? When I access google, sometimes the traceroute will run all the way out to Europe and back to the United States to access the site. how are all the different ISPs involved going between here and there going to manage a tiered system? Will every one of them charge google a fee, or force the connection to go around when the subscription price wasn't paid? It seems to me that thi

Basically its to let the service providers be free to make internet a feudal domain, just like how the current corporate business world/economy is. Each network will be a feudal domain on which the provider will be free to decide what happens, who travels, who sees what and who cannot see what, behind the guise of charging. Dont like something ? charge more. Competitor ? charge much more.

Its something everyone should be against. The correct way for the isps to get out of the shit they have put themselves

This is the backside of censorship
If only the big media outlets have the pipes to get the word out then the message can be more easily controlled.
Why do MS and GE need their own networks?
Why were the rules changed to allow this?
Look at the dates that all of these things happened for yourself
Big corps need contracts and favors, Government needs the media to stay on message.
If just anybody can spill the beans, it queers the deal.

But they don't pay for all of the pipes... Remember all that Dark Fibre they bought up in 2007?

I remember thinking they're preparing for this sort of thing (in one form or another) - they're pretty good at anticipating trends.
If they've got the backbone bandwidth to trade for last mile bandwidth they'll be able to operate at substantially lower cost than other
high bandwidth users (read:Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter - prime competetors all).

Of course you're right. But it's exactly the sort of loaded language used in the summary that will get the multiple-tiers pushed through--if the biased vocabulary succeeds, the providers have already won.

(And despite providers' increased revenue, don't expect the price to go down for end users.)

Actually, they don't. Google has peering agreements in a lot of places, so they pay nothing for bandwidth. Peering agreements exist because both parties benefit from the connectivity. I suspect that an ISP that tried to present Google with a bill would be told 'we're not going to pay, we're happy to simply blackhole your network. Have fun explaining to your users why they can't send mail or IMs to gmail users, can't browse YouTube and can't search the web with Google.'

Still, I don't quite understand how an ISP could "charge" a website for the services it provides. I mean, youtube doesn't shove videos down the pipes, they get transmitted because users deliberately requests them. How does this work legally?

I have already paid my ISP for the bandwidth from slashdot.org, just as slashdot have paid their service bill for the bandwidth they consume.

ISPs want to be paid twice for the same service, and media monopolies want an unfair advantage over their competitor. This goes against the founding spirit of the internet, big media want their monopoly back.

Your role is something like that of a shopkeeper. It would be rather unpleasant if your bandwidth got throttled and prevented you from connecting with customers. So you pay your protection fee... erm, access to the supercool higher tier internet for really 'fast' speeds.

I think this is a natural progression of ISPs-as-loss-leaders. Companies like Sky+BT, Talk Talk, Orange Mobile and so on give ISP access away for free. The money's got to come from somewhere, and the margins on the other services that those companies provide aren't enough.

"Get our basic package to access the internet very slowly at low priority, only £9.99/month. Want to be able to use the iPlayer during waking hours? Get our BBC pack for only £4.99/month extra. Sorry, but due to a dispute with Google over pricing, we're unable to offer our Search Engine pack this month, so you won't be able to find anything on the internet".

It all really depends what the owners of the websites you visit do when the guy in the italian suit says 'nice website you've got here, it would be a shame if burnt dow... er... if all the packets got dropped, know what I mean? Me and my 'associates' can here make sure that doesn't happen, can't we Guiseppe? How does £50k a month sound."

Oh no, it makes sense to intentionally cripple the presumably cheaper lower tier products when they have a nice and shiny, and more expensive, high tier product to offer when you get fed up, nevermind that the actual cost for the provider is the same, raional thought and logic have never been a problem for a good business plan.As for packet inspection, a perfect oppotunity to implement it widely, just wait until they decide to put noninspectable packages in the not-moving-at-all-lane-until-key-provided.

just wait until they decide to put noninspectable packages in the not-moving-at-all-lane-until-key-provided.

Some form of Steganography [wikipedia.org] would prove useful in such a case. You could disguise your encrypted files as images or sound files for example.. it's not like they're going to have someone checking every single one of these to make sure they're real, and even if someone does enquire you could say it's "art".. heh.

'the internet works just how it works. to be sure to have some packets go faster then others...dont they need to inspect every packet, see who send it and then decide to put some on the slow lane?'

They'll be using a sophisticated 'packet redirection' technique, where packets will be re-routed to alternate addresses as required. Speed of delivery will not be prioritized, but packet inspection by third parties will be explicity avoided so that the recipient does not incur expensive overheads. Mr Vaizey recent